Hello Again

Sorry about the long delay between posts.  South African electricity disagrees with my power cords, so I had a bit of a wait while waiting for the newest one to arrive. 

 

So.  Making up for lost time.

 

1.  Three weekends ago I went to Tzaneen, a township about an hour or so away from Giyani, with a couple of other volunteers to visit Cordelia, my language teacher from pre-service training.  Now, Lonely Planet, ever generous in most of its descriptions and always ready to find delight in even the most boring subjects, basically describes Limpopo as a "barren wasteland."  (I'm summarizing here, I'm not going to pull out my book for an exact quotation.)  While I think the Giyani area is incredibly beautiful, after the dry/winter season where not much is growing and comparing it to the rather more lush vistas of KZN, I was ready to admit that perhaps they weren't speaking entirely out of their hats—though compared to the Bela Bela area, where SA 18 did their training, Giyani is still paradise.  Tzaneen, however, is surrounded by orchards and is intensely green even now, enough so to make even an otherwise cramped and uncomfortable taxi journey pleasant.  Once in town, we indulged in the pleasures of a larger, more diverse town than Giyani: we explored the mall.  I bought pens, we ate Indian food.  It's a good thing we didn't go to Woolworth's, or otherwise I probably would have gone broke buying cheeses.

 

Cordelia lives in a village outside the town, and we stayed the night at her house.  We met her family, all of whom were incredibly welcoming and excited to have us their.  They had purchased an enormous quantity of food for a braai (barbeque), and we, the Americans, were placed in charge of the grill.  We made the mistake of putting the meat on while the fire was too hot, so the first batch of chicken taken off was an exercise in living dangerously—not only was John's hand in danger of being burned off every time he tried to flip a piece of chicken, but the chicken was seriously undercooked (we had the sense to put it back on for a second cooking after the fire had died down some, so no one ended up with salmonella, at least as far as I know).

 

That evening, as happens every time there is a large gathering in South Africa, Cordelia's family sang and danced in celebration of our visit.  A large contingent of neighborhood children appeared and arranged themselves into a choir to serenade us.  We were told that we should sing something as well, but unfortunately our imagination failed us and our self-consciousness at performing further constrained us, so we demurred as politely as we could.  Cordelia helpfully explained that in America, people are too embarrassed to sing and dance like this; this is probably not true of all Americans, but it is certainly true of the three of us.  We were given a reprieve, but told that when we return in November, we must come with something to sing.